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beginnerlinuxincident-response~8 min4 rounds

Disk Is at 100% and the App Is Down. rm -rf?

A server is out of disk and the app is down. A teammate wants to rm -rf the logs to free space fast. Defend what you actually do first.

the decision you defend

A web server is throwing 'No space left on device' and the app is down. df shows / at 100%. A teammate says just run rm -rf on /var/log to free space fast. What do you do, and why?

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the situation

It is the middle of a workday. The main web server starts returning 500s and the application log shows repeated 'No space left on device' errors. You SSH in and df -h shows / at 100%.

context

It is a single VM running the app behind nginx. Application and access logs are written to /var/log, and no log rotation was ever configured. A teammate in chat says: just rm -rf /var/log and restart the service, that always works.

How this challenge works

Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 4 rounds. When you are done, you are scored against a verified rubric so you can see exactly what a complete answer covers - these are learning prompts, not gotchas.